Review by New York Times Review
FOR THE LAST HALF-CENTURY we've had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two - the literary and the scientific. "The two cultures" is the bumper-sticker phrase for this view. It dates back to a hugely influential 1959 lecture, also published in book form that year, by C. P. Snow - "a moderately able research chemist who had become a successful novelist," in the historian Lisa Jardine's not very adulatory description. According to Snow, on one side were the humanists, on the other the scientists, and between them lay a shameful "gulf of mutual incomprehension." Which side are you on? Snow offered a litmus test: If you can't describe the second law of thermodynamics, you're just as illiterate as any boffin who can't quote Shakespeare. In the 21st century, the two cultures are still with us, but the fault lines have shifted. Plenty of people can talk about thermodynamics and Shakespeare with equal facility; for that matter, no one has ever explained the second law better than Tom Stoppard in "Arcadia" ("You cannot stir things apart"). You're probably comfortable with scientific expressions like "litmus test." The question now is, can you explain a hash table? A linked list? A bubble sort? Maybe you can write - but can you code? Vikram Chandra is a wonderful novelist and apparently knows his way around an algorithm, too. His new book is an unexpected tour de force, different from anything he has done before. It has the oddly off-putting title "Geek Sublime," which disguises its ambition: to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds - the cultures - of technology and art. The book becomes an exquisite meditation on aesthetics, and meanwhile it is also part memoir, the story of a young man finding his way from India to the West and back, and from literature to programming and back. Chandra offers a far more complex view of clashing cultures than Snow ever did. He has lived inside more than just two. As a student and budding fiction writer, he supported himself programming computers in Houston and discovered the hypercharged culture of America's Silicon Valleys. The code warriors have a self-conscious mystique - masculine, aggressive, cool. But beyond that, some think of themselves as artists, striving not just for efficacy but for beauty. "Hackers are makers rather than scientists," the programmer Paul Graham declared in a manifesto. Programmers feel an exhilarating creative mastery, and Chandra captures it. "I work inside an orderly, simplified hallucination," he writes, "a maya that is illusion and not-illusion - the code I write sets off other subterranean incantations which are completely illegible to me, but I can cause objects to move in the real world, and send messages to the other side of the planet." Still, does that make them poets? Programming was not always such a manly field, by the way. It was originally a field for women, and not just because it was invented by one, Ada Lovelace, in the 1840s. The human "computers" on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos were women; so were the "Eniac girls" coding for John von Neumann in the 1940s. Chandra recounts the "masculinization" of the industry through male-oriented aptitude tests that led to an influx of what one analyst called "often egocentric, slightly neurotic" programmers disproportionately equipped with beards and sandals. It reminds him of something quite different at first blush: the gender politics of the British Raj. The colonizers deployed a rhetoric of effeminacy against the colonized. "The British 'cult of manliness' had been an essential component of the creed of Empire," Chandra writes. "Intelligence and intellectual capability were inextricably intertwined with masculinity; women and all others who exhibited symptoms of femininity were fuzzy-headed, illogical and easily overcome by emotion; they were incapable especially of scientific reasoning and therefore self-knowledge and progress. The state of the world - women without power, Englishmen ruling Indians - bore out the truth of these propositions." Two cultures, indeed. When I studied linguistics in college (way back in the 20th century), "generative grammar" was all the rage. This was the algorithmic syntax put forward by Noam Chomsky, who proposed that all natural languages have an underlying structure that can be teased out and modeled as a rigorous system of rules. What no one told me was that generative grammar had been invented earlier in India - 2,500 years earlier, in fact. Sometime around 500 B.C., the ancient scholar Panini analyzed the Sanskrit language at a level of complexity that has never been matched since, for any language. His grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, comprises some 4,000 rules meant to generate all the possible sentences of Sanskrit from roots of sound and meaning - phonemes and morphemes. The rules include definitions; headings; operational rules, including "replacement, affixation, augmentation and compounding"; and "metarules," which call other rules recursively. Sound familiar? Panini's grammar of Sanskrit bears more than a family resemblance to a modern programming language. As Chandra says, the grammar is itself "an algorithm, a machine that consumes phonemes and morphemes and produces words and sentences." This is not a coincidence. American syntactic theory, Chomsky channeling Panini, formed the soil in which the computer languages grew. Chandra begins a journey into what he calls the Sanskrit cosmopolis: "the Sanskrit-speaking and writing ecumene which, at its height, sprawled from Afghanistan to Java, across dozens of kingdoms, languages and cultures." This might be considered his intellectual heritage, but European colonialism and its aftermath left Sanskrit marginalized. It bored him in school: "Sanskrit - as it was taught in the classroom - smelled to me of hypocrisy, of religious obscurantism, of the khaki-knickered obsessions of the Hindu far right, and worst, of an oppression that went back thousands of years." The official language was Hindi, and he writes in English, "the language of the conquerors." So before he can come to Sanskrit, Chandra turns instead to the programming languages, a bestiary of which he lovingly describes: from the crude early PL/1 to Microsoft's dorky Visual Basic, the fashionable Clojure (which "all the really hip kids are learning") and the "esoteric" Malbolge, named after Dante's eighth circle of hell, and with good reason. Then he starts writing his first novel, "Red Earth and Pouring Rain," with its poet protagonist, and wonders: What makes a poem beautiful? Back he goes across the cultural divide, to the Tantric texts of the first millennium and the cosmology of Abhinavagupta, in a quest for aesthetics that coding can't fulfill. Poetry and logic live in different places, after all. Poetry has patience. It reaches into a dark vastness. But computer code has powers too. "It acts and interacts with itself, with the world," Chandra says. And it changes us along the way. "We already filter experience through software - Facebook and Google offer us views of the world that we can manipulate, but which also, in turn, manipulate us. The embodied language of websites, apps and networks writes itself into us." Must one learn computer programming, then, to qualify as literate? Of course not. It doesn't hurt to be aware of code, though. One of these days code will be aware of us. Must one learn computer programming to qualify as literate? JAMES GLEICK is the author, most recently, of "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 7, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Chandra's (Sacred Games, 2007) first nonfiction book provides a key to the webby complexity of his fiction and awakens fresh appreciation for computer code's world-changing properties. Chandra came to the U.S. from Bombay to attend Columbia University for his second degree and write fiction. Seeking work in 1986, he discovered his gift for digital technology and turned himself into a freelance computer programmer: Fiction has been my vocation, and code my obsession. There are many correlations between the two. As Chandra, brainy, delving, and spellbinding, delineates the intricacy and beauty of code, he also identifies historical and social forces at play in the machismo and misogyny of programming culture, the ubiquity of the Indian geek, and the dangerously decaying software used by governmental bureaucracies. As Chandra illuminates links between programming and literature in bedazzling elucidations of Sanskrit, linguistics, aesthetics, and Hindu, Tantric, and Buddhist beliefs, he also conducts unique and heady inquiries into codes, ethical as well as binary. Chandra's creative and elegant meshing of thought and experience, conscience and storytelling nets both the profane and the sublime.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Chandra (Sacred Games) explores the connections between the worlds of computer programming and writing, beginning with the fact that "[b]oth writers and programmers struggle with language." In a short span, the book offers much material to consider, leaping from a history of computer programming and a primer on logic gates and how these programs work, to a personal of Chandra's writing life, to some serious philosophical inquiry into how the term "beauty" might be applied to programming. The latter thread draws mainly on the rasa-dhvani theory of aesthetic analysis (from Indian philosophers Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta), and although the ideas presented are sometimes challenging, Chandra provides more than sufficient intellectual guidance. Chandra's book calls for a fuller appreciation of the programming world, not only because of the exponentially growing roles software plays in our lives, but also because of the actual work programmers do; in fact, he says of comparisons between programming and other disciplines, "When programmers say what they do is just like what writers do, or gardeners, or painters, the error is that they aren't claiming enough, the fault is that they are being too humble." Chandra's melodic prose further adds to the contingency of his ambitious ideas. This book is truly a relic of today's day and age. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Chandra's (creative writing, UC Berkley; Sacred Games) first nonfiction book is a critique on coding, writing, beauty, society, philosophy, literary theory, and Indian culture in which the author aims to determine whether coding can be considered an artistic endeavor. Supporting himself through graduate school by teaching himself how to program, he was astonished at the amount of money available in that field and the machismo common among programmers. No previous knowledge of programming language is required to read this title; however, the book covers so much material that the connections Chandra hopes to make can easily be lost. Chapters on the author's childhood in India and literary theory may seem tangential but are essential to the case he is building. Narrator Neil Shah has a pleasant voice, but there is very little inflection or emotion in the performance, which, over time, becomes robotic. VERDICT Fans of Chandra's fiction will find this work interesting because he discusses his own writing process; computer programmers, artists, and geeks of all kinds will enjoy it as well.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fruitful exploration of computer-age aesthetics, when artists are making use of programming even as programmers consider themselves artists.Poetrys beauty is infinite, writes programmer and acclaimed novelist Chandra (Sacred Games, 2007, etc.). True enough, but Windows Vistas code is still infinitely kludgy, even if, as the author argues, the iterative processes of programmingwrite, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors, mistakes), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewriteexactly duplicate the methods of artists. It is an argument that Chandra advances with great subtlety, though it perhaps does not help his case that most of his more extensive examples come from the corpus of Indian, and particularly Sanskrit, literature, which will make that argument sometimes challenging to follow for some readers. Gradually, the book loosens into what at times seem to be only marginally connected essays: Gender parity and code parity are much different things, and the bigness of epics such as theMahabharatais considerably different from the bigness of big data. Still, there is a charm to Chandras sometimes-exotic approach, even as he circles back to some of his central questions: What makes a poem beautiful? Can we use the criteria we employ to answer that question to evaluate a computer program as well? The answers he proposes occasionally open onto still other questions, as with this one: When programmers say what they do is just like what writers do, or gardeners, or painters, the error is that they arent claiming enough, the fault is that they are being too humble. To compare code to works of literature may point the programmer towards legibility and elegance, but it says nothing about the ability of code to materialize logic.An engaging exercise in interdisciplinary thought, both elegant and eloquent. Besides, who can resist a text that works karma, Marcel Duchamp and iterative programming into a single thought? Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
